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Thursday, May 14, 2015

A First Big Step Toward Mapping the Human Brain

Photo: Katie M. Palmer

"It’s a long, hard road to understanding the human brain, and one of the first milestones in that journey is building a … database." according to Katie M. Palmer, associate editor covering science and health.

Neurons in the database are mapped in 3D space. Allen Institute for Brain Science. Photo: Wired

In the past few years, neuroscientists have embarked on several
ambitious projects to make sense of the tangle of neurons that makes the
human experience human, and an experience. In the UK, Henry Markram—the
Helen Cho to Elon Musk’s Tony Stark—is leading the Human Brain Project,
a $1.3 billion plan to build a computer model of the brain. In the US,
the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies
(BRAIN) Initiative hopes to, in its own nebulous way, map the dynamic
activity of the noggin’s 86 billion neurons.

Now, the Allen Institute for Brain Science,
a key player in the BRAIN Initiative, has launched a database of
neuronal cell types that serves as a first step toward a
complete understanding of the brain. It’s the first milestone in the
Institute’s 10-year MindScope
plan, which aims to nail down how the visual system of a mouse works,
starting by developing a functional taxonomy of all the different types
of neurons in the brain.

“The big plan is to try to understand how the brain works,” saysLydia Ng,
director of technology for the database. “Cell types are one of the
building blocks of the brain, and by making a big model of how they’re
put together, we can understand all the activity that goes into
perceiving something and creating an action based on that perception.”

The Allen Cell Types Database,
on its surface, doesn’t look like much. The first release includes
information on just 240 neurons out of hundreds of thousands in the
mouse visual cortex, with a focus on the electrophysiology of those
individual cells: the electrical pulses that tell a neuron to fire,
initiating a pattern of neural activation that results in perception and
action. But understanding those single cells well enough to put them
into larger categories will be crucial to understanding the brain as a
whole—much like the periodic table was necessary to establish basic
chemical principles.Read more...

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About Me

Hello, my name is Helge Scherlund and I am the Education Editor and Online Educator of this personal weblog and the founder of eLearning • Computer-Mediated Communication Center.
I have an education in the teaching adults and adult learning from Roskilde University, with Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) and Human Resource Development (HRD) as specially studied subjects. I am the author of several articles and publications about the use of decision support tools, e-learning and computer-mediated communication. I am a member of The Danish Mathematical Society (DMF), The Danish Society for Theoretical Statistics (DSTS) and an individual member of the European Mathematical Society (EMS). Note: Comments published here are purely my own and do not reflect those of my current or future employers or other organizations.